How pop culture has shaped our understanding of aliens
Anticipation of the unclassified report by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force has, unsurprisingly, sent America’s long-running UFO fascination into overdrive.
The confirmation of an unexplained somethings by even former President Barack Obama has felt unsettling, like a misread headline. The US government … is taking unidentified flying objects … seriously? To have them explicitly, publicly concerned with UFOs seems dubious – like the stuff of movies, which has long been the appropriate and accessible lane for interest in eerie objects in the sky.
The Pentagon report, which does not speculate on alien spacecraft but also does not close any doors for more than 120 sightings by Navy pilots that have baffled scientists and military experts, demands serious scientific inquiry, and also invites imagination. How to explain the as yet unexplainable and unknown? For decades of government disinterest or silence on the matter, the public has turned to pop culture – particularly film and television – that refracted fascination with the unknown into extraterrestrial stories that have shaped our collective shorthand for aliens: – flying saucers, little green men, hyper-powerful beyond our own.
From The X Files to Men in Black, Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Star Wars to every other Marvel movie, Hollywood has for decades provided an engrossing feedback loop for interest in the extraterrestrial: a reflection of our fears and capaciousness, whose ubiquitous popularity has in turn fueled more interest in UFOs as perennially compelling entertainment tropes not to be taken seriously. If the vast unknown was daunting, awe-inspiring, overwhelming, then exploring its contours through stories offered a modicum of control – by the authors, and by the expectations of a popular audience. UFO and alien stories have, after all, always said more about ourselves – our fears, our anxieties, our hope, our adaptability – than any potential outside visitor.
Alien stories predate the coinage of the term “UFO”, which is widely believed to have entered popular culture on 24 June 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot from Idaho, reported seeing nine circular objects flying at supersonic speed near Washington’s Mount Rainier. Half a century earlier, Pearsons magazine began serializing War of the Worlds by British scifi author HG Wells, which transmuted concerns over British imperial occupations into one of the earliest stories of extraterrestrial invasion (Martians, in southern England; Orson Welles, in his famous radio rendition of the story in 1938, shifted the location to New York). The fascination with alien invasion has been enduring, and lucrative, throughout the decades – Wells’ story was once again updated in a 2005 blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise and again in a 2019 TV series.
Widespread fascination with shadowy encounters didn’t pick up in earnest, however, until breathless news coverage of Arnold’s account, which labeled his alleged sighting “flying saucers” – an idea so thoroughly emblematic of the heightened cold war period that UFOs are, as an aesthetic, considered retro. Reports of UFOs surged; the government’s Project Blue Book analyzed more than 12,000 sightings between 1952 and 1969 (701 were left unexplained). Popular culture, meanwhile, used the craze as a mirror for cold war fears of faceless nuclear annihilation and Communist infiltration in films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956.
Alien movies have generally reflected shifting cultural anxieties, from the existential terror of nuclear war to foreign enslavement to loss of bodily control. As Diana Walsh Pasulka, a
professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, told NBC News, UFO-themed entertainment generally falls into two categories: hostile aliens, in which “the UFO event is revealed to be detrimental to humans” a la Independence Day or Cloverfield; and benevolent, world-expanding encounters seen in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kindand ET: the Extra-Terrestrial. There’s a reason there are college courses on aliens in pop culture: fascination with the fantastical unknown has over decades settled into numerous sub-genres and explored various themes, including alien invasion (Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow), body transference and mind control (Men in Black, The Thing ), , parables of human xenophobia (Avatar, District 9), nonhuman space sagas (Star Wars, Star Trek), and human-alien cooperation (many of the Marvel movies).
Alien films have continued to plumb the boundaries of our emotional worlds and internalized cultural events. The X Files creator Chris Carter has said the cult-hit show, which ran from 1993 to 2002 and depicts a long-running government cover-up of extraterrestrial meddling, spoke to lingering government distrust post-Watergate. Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield, in which something dark and dangerous attacks central New York, channels 9/11esque terror through an alien unknown. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, starring Amy Adams as a grief-stricken linguist, dealt with the tantalizing question of how we’d find any common communication with an extraterrestrial presence. Netflix’s smash hit Stranger Things is as much about generational nostalgia for popular 80s alien sci-fi as the extradimensional monsters stalking smalltown Hawkins, Indiana – a closed loop of pop culture fixation with the extraterrestrial.
It is tantalizing to wish for a concrete answer to whether aliens exist – a confirmation that would be, frankly, too cinematic to believe, and one we almost certainly won’t get from the government until, say, an Independence Day-type situation. But it’s unlikely to be fulfilling, or end pop cultural fascination with the extraterrestrial. UFO stories can be terrifying, silly, bombastic, insidious. They’re also fun, a legible way to explore powers and ideas beyond human perception through the familiar structure and beats of human-crafted stories. There’s a reason many alien films hold on to the reveal of its creatures until the final act: there is hope in the open-endedness, space in the indefinite, momentum in the push for answers. What is left, once we have them? And if speculation about the extraterrestrial, in movies or in real life, allows us to channel chasmic emotions through imagining the unknown … do we want them?